


already on the ground, i know you won't let me down

by theseourbodies



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Blood, Danny's Mysterious Hand Tats, Gen, Non-Graphic Description of Injury, Peril
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-17 05:16:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10587201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theseourbodies/pseuds/theseourbodies
Summary: Danny has big hands. In this moment, this is of particular interest to Steve.





	

**Author's Note:**

> written kind of slapdash in the middle of the night, as per usual. Cursory review only, sorry. I hope you enjoy.

Danny has big hands—a wide span from goofy-thumb to pinky, hard knuckles and thick, blunt fingers. Steve’s never seen him with a band on his left hand, but the slight indent from years and years of wear is still there, haunting the skin like a ghost, a shadow. Early in their partnership, Danny had had the habit of rubbing the slightly indented skin fretfully when he was nervous or fidgety, and it had taken Steve an embarrassingly long time to figure out why the hell he was doing it—that Danny was looking for a connection, something real, gold or maybe platinum under his searching thumb. Steve never asked about it, and doesn’t ask now—back then, they had both been trying to figure one another out, finding solid ground to stand on; later, when Steve knew Danny better and Danny knew more about Steve than any one person possibly ever had, Steve had just known not to bring it up at all, the chance to ask without repercussion years gone by then. 

Steve also never asks about the tats, even though they sit so strangely on Danny’s big blunt hands, black ink next to thin white scars on rough, freckled skin. Danny never does anything without a reason, Steve has figured out, even if the reason doesn’t really make logical sense; he figures the tiny little marks, the plain, clean letters spanning his knuckles, fit into that pattern, too—meaningful, but not really meant to be shared. They’ve just become another piece of Danny that simply is, like the shirts and the hair, the bum knee. Steve doesn’t really think about it that much at all, anymore. Not often, anyway. Really. 

Petting over those same little marks, now, he is thinking about them, but he figures that’s an ok thing to do, considering that Danny’s hands are pressed painfully into his side, keeping his guts in place. Steve kind of wants to ask, anyway, because that’s his blood on Danny’s hands and he’s unfocused and bizarrely tired considering the slam of adrenaline still spiking through his body and clenching low in his belly. 

“Wanna know, Danno, y’gotta tell me what they mean—“ he mutters through a mushy mouth, but the words get shredded apart in the blasted-open air around them and lost under the sound of Danny shouting and Kono shouting and gunfire. Steve keeps trying to follow the different sounds to a gun type, but for some reason Kono’s Sig Sauer is the only thing he can really hear distinctly, though he can see Chin’s calves tensing out of the corner of his eye as he absorbs the barely-there recoil of the new shotgun he’d picked up a month ago. “Good gun,” he says, forcing the words out around his stupid, thick-feeling tongue. It’s difficult as hell and his annoyance at that gets all tangled up with the all-over pain a gunshot wound causes—

Oh, is that it, has he been—

“Danno--” he tries to say sharply, clenching down on Danny’s pushing, painful hand, with his own, “I’ve been shot.”   
Danny is spitting something low and fast into his earpiece, but he looks down when Steve talks to him, which is nice. Danny always looks when Steve talks to him. 

“Yeah babe, yeah, we’re taking fire, you took a hit but we’re gonna get you out of here, ok?” 

Well, yeah, of course. “But why’m I down here?” He’s been wounded in action before, been shot and knifed and once, memorably, stabbed with a very old woman’s extremely sharp hair stick. The ground is abruptly very hard and very present beneath him, and he’s never been downed like this before, not really. “Danny, why’m I down,” he asks again, trying to sit up through the pain and coming up hard against Danny’s other hand, hovering above his clavicle.   
_Record screech_ , Steve thinks as he slumps back down, glaring up. Danny glares right back. 

“You’ve been shot in the gut and there’s no exit wound that I can see, ok, so I need you to _stay down_ before you accidentally get shot again.”

“’M a highly-decorated commanding officer Danny, w’don’t have accidents.” Steve mutters, focusing on the warmth of Danny’s big hand instead of the pain trying to overwhelm him in waves. He knows that Danny can tell he’s not going to try again; just like he knows Danny, Danny knows him, and Steve knows he’s doing a sloppy job keeping how much trying to sit up had taken out of him off his dumb rubber face. 

“Well ok then, sailor—stand down; that’s an order.” 

Steve blinks up at Danny—even that hurts, he had almost forgotten that feeling, wow—and he wants to laugh at Danny fitting the weird little command phrases into his unhappy-looking mouth in his dry-as-dirt voice. He’s still feeling wavery at his edges, and it makes everything soft and out of focus; in the sunlight Danny is stuck in honey-thick stillness punctuated by lightning quick shifts when he moves and Steve’s tired brain struggles to follow him. 

“You good, boss? Got it under control?” Kono’s face snaps into existence above his face and Steve smiles tightly at her.

“Can’t stay,” he manages , and she nods quickly.

“Gotcha boss, we’re working on it. Think you can move?”

“Danno won’ let me.”

“Good thing we’re here to help you out then, huh?” 

More hands join Danny’s, warm patches against the all-over ache settling into his body around the central bright star of pain low on his belly. 

“You good, brah? Duke’s brought the cavalry, we need to get you somewhere safe,” Chin says gently from somewhere out of Steve’s line of sight, and he pulls a big grin up from somewhere deep just in case Chin can see him. 

“Yeah, get me up. Groun’s hard.”

“ _Oh_ , the _ground’s hard_ , well excuse me for trying to keep you from exacerbating your _massively bleeding gunshot wound_ by making you stay there, your highness.” Danny keeps talking, a low, comforting buzz of complaint and threats soaked through with deep worry as the team slowly gets Steve sitting and then pulls him to his feet laboriously. It… hurts, and he hates it, hates the pain like this that lays him out, makes him useless in the face of it, but everything abruptly loses the hazy filter that’s been fucking with him in the first rush of the sharp clarity that comes with agony and motion. He pulls his own legs under him and gets most of his weight settled on his right foot, doing his best to keep his core loose as Kono tucks herself under one arm and Chin gently takes the opposite arm, Danny’s big hands still pressed tight to the make-shift bandage with Steve’s own hand still clamped on top of the whole mess. 

They move together, a strange multi-headed beast, straight back from the cover they’d taken too far out in the open and around the nearest warehouse to where Duke and the EMTs were waiting with a stretcher ready. 

The situation requires consciousness, and Steve stays with it for as long as he can, up to the ambulance and into the brisk hands of the EMTs; he barely notices the prick of the needle, but the quality of the air shifts again, goes soft. So much more happens between one blink and the next, people shifting too fast; but there’s pressure against the fading sharpness in his side, familiar hands holding him together. 

“D--?”

“Just shut up and let the drugs do the hard work, babe.” Danny’s voice is the only clear thing in the universe just then, filling up the blank spaces in Steve’s head like it was created to be there. “Rest now, we got you. 

We got you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Steve's turn to take a bullet, because I have a problem. Questions, comments, requests or prompts? Find me at wecouldbeheroes-loverswecouldbe.tumblr.com


End file.
